Hacker News Reader

Comment by rman666 | Hacker News Reader

This is news? Gawd I feel old.

You and me both. Now days people send their kids off to college with a cell phone. When I went off to college my Mom gave me a roll of quarters to use to call home with. I used phone hacks instead and spent the quarters on beer :) Back then a roll of quarters bought enough beers to get you pretty buzzed.

Ha! I remember the thrill of having a roll of quarters at Buck a Draft night.

It sounds a lot like (JFYI):

https://tinyapps.org/blog/200702250700_why_in_my_day.html

LOL, good ones, I guess I am an old guy :)

This was probably posted here because of the book promotion articles referring to Beto O'Rourke's hacker culture history, which is directly connected to this whistle, and the subsequent solder hacks on Radio Shack phone dialers to emulate said whistle's 2600 Hz tone.

So there is at least an indirect current events element to it. Fun times were had once.

I thought he was brute-forcing phone card pins with wardialers?

You are probably thinking of the WATS pins. It was a huge thing at the time to war dial entire exchanges to find them, and then publish the lists. A lot of the time people would then use unsecured bridges to hold mass group chats. Beto was no stranger to those circles, even though cDc actively stated the level of risk one takes on when doing so.

Bridges were terrible for modems, as at any moment another war dialer would connect, or people looking to chat, and knock the modem offline from the announce beep.

The chats were mainly social, but a lot of technical discourse occurred, which was a huge draw.

Robert Francis O'Rourke.

It saddens me that Gen Z hackers think a Redbox is where you rent blu-rays.

(But on a serious note, it surprises me how few people in the community have a sense of history. I spent a lot of time in the late 90s/early 2000s reading stuff on textfiles.com, researching terms etc I didn't understand, and I think it really helped me become a better hacker.)

Now, in the age of Wikipedia, it astounds me how uncurious many people are. Maybe I'm werid, but I often look stuff up and click around.

It makes me sad that we have so much more information than previous generations, but so few seem to leverage it.

(Ex: most of my technical issues can be solved with a simple DDG search. Back in the day it would have been hours of reading man pages, poking through mailing list archives, or possibly popping into the IRC room for the devs to do something as simple as get a wifi card working)

> Now, in the age of Wikipedia, it astounds me how uncurious many people are

I find myself constantly astounded by this. But I think this age we are in only exposes something that is probably the default state for this country.

I was "into computers" growing up in the early 80's and I remember the number one question I got from adults was - "what are you going to do with a computer?". I'm guessing many people had the same experience.

Curiosity isn't a default state. It is what separates us from everyone else. Very sadly.

> It is what separates us from everyone else.

I think everyone is curious, the only difference is what people are curious about. Not everyone gives a rip about computers, that doesn't make them fundamentally uncurious.

there's people working in the sector today that never heard a honest landline tone, only the sound mobiles still play for us nostalgic.

I routinely now work with people who never experienced the world without the internet.

When cars, airplanes, radio and TV were first invented (and commercialized), it must have been relatively easier for folks to imagine life before them. Immediate access to information is truly jaw-dropping.

I had the odd experience of nobody at work recognizing the Sputnik satellite. Granted, I'm probably somewhat nerdier than average, and am originally from Russia, but still - a 0% hit rate seemed odd.

I routinely now work with people who never experienced the world without the internet.

One of the people I work with didn't know what a tractor feed printer is when I mentioned it to him. And this is an IT (networking) guy.

Maybe it's terminology? I had them as a kid but referred to them as "dot matrix".

tractor feed use the tearable holed paper to feed and might or might not be dot matrix, which is how ink gets transferred to paper, you can still find tractor feed lasers around

Yes, I swear articles about the history of exactly this were embedded in the anarchists cookbook?

And Phrack, IIRC.

All news is new news to new newbs.

Yeah, I don't understand.

Who claimed it was news

__news__ .ycombinator.com

NNTP host not found.

Who decided using news as a sub domain for an http site was a good idea?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Then the hostname is selected poorly.

We are old.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

Now go watch Hackers, Antitrust, Sneakers, and The Matrix, preferably all on VHS to really drive it home.

... War Games, Pirates of Silicon Valley

War Games and Ferris Buelers Day Off were why I searched "how to hack" into excite.com a couple hours into getting my first internet capable home computer. I found ESR's "Hacker How-To" and tried to follow it with youthful zeal.

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